Killing Drug Cartel Bosses Isn’t Working, Says Top U.S. General

Gen Charles Jacoby, who heads U.S. Northern Command. Photo: NORAD

Mexico’s “decapitation” strategy of capturing or killing high-value drug cartel leaders with the help of U.S. advisers has a certain merit to it. After all, cartel bosses are seriously bad dudes who corrupt, bribe, kidnap and kill their way to power across swathes of territory across our border.

The problem, according to the chief of U.S. military forces in North America, is that the strategy isn’t working.

“The decapitation strategy — they’ve been successful at that. Twenty-two out of the top 37 trafficking figures that the Mexican government has gone after have been taken off the board,” Gen. Charles Jacoby, commander of U.S. Northern Command, said during testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday. Then, a caveat: “But it has not had an appreciable effect — an appreciable, positive effect.”

In other words, the Mexican government has demonstrably (and frequently) succeeded in capturing and killing cartel leaders. But the impact of those strikes may be fleeting. Three weeks ago, Mexican federal police reportedly came close to even capturing Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman — boss of the Sinaloa Cartel and reportedly the world’s most powerful drug lord — near the resort city of Cabo San Lucas less than a day before G20 foreign ministers gathered nearby. El Chapo, who has a security detail reported to include helicopters and up to 300 men, was likely lying low with minimal escort.

To make matters worse, killing or capturing cartel leaders hasn’t reduced the overall level of violence, or reversed the growing reach of the cartels throughout Mexico, Central America and the United States. Another problem: there’s no shortage of replacements for cartel leaders once the top bosses are taken out. Even worse, decapitation can cause violence to increase, at least in the short-term.

According to Alejandro Hope, an analyst and former official at Mexico’s CISEN (the country’s equivalent of the CIA), decapitation of “criminal bands” can escalate violence “due to succession conflicts, the unraveling of some groups, or through power vacuums that are exploited by rivals groups.” Hope supports decapitation strikes, but “accompanied by measures which will prevent destabilizing effects, and maximize effects which dissuade violence.” Namely, targeting the most violent cartels first and capturing their leaders if at all possible.

Now, the U.S. isn’t giving up on Mexico’s war quite yet. “I agree that there are other things that need to be done,” said Jacoby, who oversees the military’s homeland defense efforts as head of U.S. Northern Command. He also referenced Mexico’s latest offensive against the Zetas, aimed at reducing violence “across the northeast [region of Mexico], and I think that’s the right strategy to follow.”

The U.S. is also helping out by sending former Navy SEAL commander and counter-terrorism specialist Rear Adm. Colin Kilrain to Mexico City to serve as America’s liaison in Mexico’s war on drugs. Deploying Kilrain — a veteran of the U.S. wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq — could be a signal that from the U.S. perspective, what Mexico needs is someone “who has the special skills and experiences complementary to battling the cartels,” Mexico military specialist Roderic Camp told the Houston Chronicle.

There’s bad news in the Caribbean, though. The U.S.’s mainstay in drug interdiction efforts in the Caribbean, the Oliver Hazard Perry-class missile frigate, is being retired and replaced with the Littoral Combat Ship: the newly prized — and expensive — shoreline-warfare vessel. The problem, however, is that the Littoral Combat Ship might not be able to replace all the frigates operating in the region.

“That is one of the issues we’re seeing with the availability of naval ships is the retirement of those frigates,” said Air Force Gen. Douglas Fraser, who heads up U.S. Southern Command. “And this has been a gap that we have seen for a few years now coming — and so the Littoral Combat Ship will have a great capacity to also support our mission as well in the future.”